Stephen Hudson (1868 – 29 October 1944) is a pseudonym of the British novelist and translator Sydney Schiff, whose work was published in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.
With a substantial income from his commercially successful family, Schiff was a patron of the arts, with friendships in the musical, artistic and literary circles of England and France.
He was the host at a celebrated party in Paris on 18 May 1922, when Marcel Proust met James Joyce (without the slightest rapport); other guests included Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso.
Their house was hit by a stray German bomb in August 1944, the shock of which may have contributed to Schiff's death from heart failure two months later, at the age of 75.
[1] Austrian writer and novelist Hermann Broch (1886-1951), who fled Austria to Britain and United States in 1938, then dedicated to the memory of Hudson his masterpiece "The Death of Virgil", first published in 1945.
[1] Schiff's novels are now almost entirely forgotten; but his and his wife's significance as key figures of early Modernism, both as friends and facilitators to several major artists and writers, has recently been reassessed by Stephen Klaidman in a joint biography of the couple, Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T.S.
Her sisters were the British novelist Ada Leverson (Oscar Wilde's beloved "Sphinx"),[1] and Sybil Seligman (1868–1936), a mistress of Giacomo Puccini.